Destroyer of Worlds

by Mark Chadbourn

  Within fifteen minutes the first lines of the Enemy attempted to break through the fire. Some continued aflame for several paces before they collapsed. Others fell in the midst of the inferno. But wave after wave followed, reminding Decebalus of the red ants he had seen in the forests of Dacia when he was boy; nothing would deter them. Soon the bodies had piled so high they covered the fire-liquid, and the ranks behind rolled over the top of them.

  With a roar, Decebalus signalled the attack. To his left, the Tuatha Dé Danaan washed out in a golden wave, silent, focused, frightening in their intensity. The Brothers and Sisters of Dragons were only a step behind. At the heart of them, Decebalus swelled with pride, swinging his axe with abandon as he forced his way to the front.

  Within moments they crashed against the rocks of the Enemy, and Decebalus was hurled into such a frenzy of flashing weapons and flailing bodies that it was impossible to see anything beyond a zone of a few square inches. Noise filled his world, the endless shriek of metal on metal, the grunts of exertion, battle cries and the screams of the wounded and dying. Tossed around by a heavy swell, he never rested for a second, swinging his axe into heads, shoulder-blades, arms. Bodies crushed tight on all sides. No thoughts came; there was only time for instinct.

  The ranks of the Enemy in front of him comprised the Lament-Brood, dead beings from numerous races with swords, axes and spears rammed into their limbs so that they themselves became weapons that could not be killed, for whom wounds meant nothing; the only way to stop them was to dismember them.

  Gradually, his thought process adjusted to the blistering pace of battle, a sublime state where everything slowed and he floated amidst the chaos, able to examine the rich detail, and reflect. Blood sprayed in beautiful arcs. Raindrops on armour glittered like diamonds. Blades caught the torchlight as they whirled, trailing gold. Underfoot, the ground churned, became liquid, a swamp of gore and mud sucking at his legs.

  His axe removed the top of a skull, then spun and came down to split the face below. As the Lament-Brood warrior dropped to his knees another was already taking his place.

  To his left, Decebalus saw a Sister of Dragons battling furiously, glistening black hair slick from the rain. As she was dragged away by the flow of battle, he tried to remember her name. An unusual name. It was important that everyone was remembered, and seen as individuals sacrificing all, not as a resource to be used up to win.

  Demelza, he recalled. Monfries.

  He nodded, happy that he had marked her place in his mind. To his right, three Lament-Brood warriors surrounded a Brother of Dragons, his ringletted hair and beard plastered with blood. He had no chance, but he kept fighting to the last.

  Decebalus struggled to recall the name, cursing himself furiously until it came. ‘Stephen,’ he said aloud. ‘Harding.’

  And then Aula was at his side in the white and silver armour of one of the Tuatha Dé Danaan courts, her blond hair darkened by the rain.

  ‘Here?’ he bellowed. ‘You are no warrior!’

  With her short sword, she hacked off the arm of one of the Lament-Brood as it attempted to drive a spear into Decebalus’s chest. ‘Answer enough?’ she said.

  ‘Not quite, but it will do, for now.’

  ‘Even an uneducated barbarian like yourself deserves someone at your back.’

  They exchanged a brief look that said more than they ever had, or ever would, and then the battle sucked them in once more.

  For fifteen minutes of furious exchanges, it appeared as if the Brothers and Sisters of Dragons and the Tuatha Dé Danaan were making no headway against the constant stream of the Enemy; for every one that fell two more took their place. Decebalus saw Redcaps with their clothes of human skin, unrelenting machines of muscle, gristle and bone that exhibited tremendous power and endurance. There were the Baobhan Sith, shrieking spectral figures that shifted shape before attempting to tear out the throats of those nearby; and the Gehennis, shades flapping like sheets in the wind but with more devastating substance than they presented to the world. Towering giants swung clubs that reduced a man to a red mist, while other grotesqueries that he did not recognise ripped apart with claws and teeth.

  The explosive bolt of lightning crashed into the Enemy ranks at the point he had planned, when overconfidence had taken the edge off their fighting skills. Body parts rained down from a blackened circle inside which everything had been incinerated. More bolts blasted down at random, bringing fear to the disrupted Enemy ranks.

  Decebalus caught the briefest glimpse of Mjolnir smashing through bodies before returning to the hand of its owner, who brought down another lightning bolt before directing the storm towards the Enemy.

  Decebalus grinned: the gods had arrived.

  Laughing like a madman, his scarred, hairy body completely naked, Tyr waded through the ranks chopping down the Lament-Brood like saplings. Beside him, the Slavic god Perkunas wielded a throwing axe that sent heads flying in unison, while Ares, lost to his bloodlust, had to be continually redirected towards the Enemy so that he did not attack his own side. On a murderous rampage, the Aztecs’ Huitzilopochtli tore out the hearts of the living Enemy by plunging his hands into their chests, and the Caribbean war god Ogoun concentrated on the Lament-Brood with his machete, reducing them to quivering chunks of decomposing flesh.

  The gods were a whirlwind of fury and righteous vengeance, and every time Decebalus thought he had seen the last descend into the fray another dropped from the skies or drove a wide, bloody path through the ground troops.

  Hundreds of the Enemy were falling by the minute, and despite their numbers they were in disarray and being driven back step by step. Lugh was at the forefront of the Tuatha Dé Danaan, serious and dedicated, and though covered in gore he still glowed like the sun. Behind him, the Army of all the Courts fought on, shoulder to shoulder, for the first time since they had left their four fabled homes.

  About a third of the Brothers and Sisters of Dragons had fallen, but the rest drove on with renewed energy, faces alight with the Pendragon Spirit.

  For the next half-hour, as the Enemy was decimated, Decebalus finally began to believe that despite the odds they could win.

  The first sign that events had begun to change was a sudden retreat by the Enemy that left aV of unoccupied ground. Decebalus signalled for the Army of Dragons to proceed with caution; it looked to him as if the Enemy was encouraging them to pursue with abandon, and he never did anything any enemy wanted.

  Silence fell across the Enemy ranks, the only sound the beating of the rain on the sea of mud.

  ‘What are they doing?’ Aula asked.

  ‘Waiting,’ Decebalus replied.

  After a moment, the Enemy ranks parted and a ten-foot-tall figure stepped through, his identity at first cloaked by the storm. As he neared, Decebalus recognised him from the description Church had given during one of the numerous briefings: brutish features, part pig, part ass, added an incongruous aspect to the elegant clothes of the ancient Egyptian ruling class. Seth, god of evil and the desert, raised a staff mounted with a single golden eye and a flurry of snow swirled around him.

  ‘Fragile Creatures!’ His booming voice sounded like a boulder dragged across gravel. ‘My people were great and wondrous, shining stars in the vast firmament of Existence. Yet you destroyed them, and in your arrogance you thought you could do it with impunity.’

  ‘He is talking about the devastation wrought by Church and the others in the Great Pyramid,’ Aula whispered.

  Decebalus barely heard her. Already his tactician’s mind was racing ahead, weighing potential options as he tried to evaluate what Seth would do.

  ‘Get back,’ he said loudly after a few seconds, before bellowing, ‘Retreat!’

  The word had barely left his mouth when Seth raised his other hand to reveal an object that radiated a brilliant white light. There was a second when all the sound appeared to have been drained from the world, and then a shimmering, glassy wave washed out from Seth and the entire
battlefield lit up, growing brighter and brighter until it felt as if the sun had crashed to the ground.

  And that was the last thing any of them saw.

  7

  In the Grim Lands there was little to mark the passage of time. Sometimes the quality of light would be a shade darker, sometimes it would have a silvery glint, as though night and day were coming and going beyond the constantly rolling mists. Everywhere was grey, all the time. It left the spirits dampened, and gradually leached the energy from both Mallory and Caitlin. Each incline became a little harder to climb, each graveyard navigated with an increasing number of rest stops, until they started to fear that the mood of the place would eventually bring a critical lethargy that would leave them drifting and aimless like the land’s regular inhabitants.

  Sitting on the dusty gravel with her back to a tomb marked with the legend Et In Arcadia Ego, Caitlin examined the flickering blue flame of the Wayfinder and tried to ignore the feeling that if she closed her eyes she would sleep for ever.

  ‘I wonder if Hal is aware of what’s happening,’ she mused.

  Sitting beneath a carved skull on an adjoining tomb, Mallory lazily drew a cross in the dust with the heel of his boot. ‘That was quite a sacrifice he made. Imagine being a part of the Blue Fire - a part of everything there is and was - and then giving it all up to lock yourself in that little lantern to guide our way. It must have been like being God, and then quitting to become an ant.’

  ‘You wouldn’t expect anything less. He’s always been one of us . . . of our Five.’ She winced and corrected herself: ‘Our Four. I wish we’d got a chance to know him better.’

  ‘It’s even more of a sacrifice than that,’ Mallory continued. ‘He can be destroyed while he’s in the Wayfinder. He’d escaped from death, and now he’s put himself back in the game. That’s brave.’

  The flame continued to point the way across the last few yards of the graveyard and out into the wilderness beyond, where Callow was on reconnaissance.

  ‘Does this place make you think of your husband and boy?’ Mallory asked.

  ‘I’ve never stopped thinking of them. Not in a morbid way. I remember the good times, and what they meant to me, and I know we’re going to be together again some day. Have you ever lost someone you love?’

  ‘Yeah.’ He paused before realising, ‘I just don’t know who.’

  The thought clearly troubled him so much that Caitlin didn’t press. Chewing on his lip absently, he slipped back into a deep reflection.

  In the silence that followed, Caitlin became aware of the presence of her other selves deep in the back of her head. Their whispering always ebbed and flowed like the pulse of her blood, but now she could hear Brigid’s voice growing more insistent. Listening intently, she absently spoke the words the second they came to her: ‘He’s coming! Run!’

  Mallory started. ‘Who’s coming?’

  ‘I . . . I don’t know.’

  They were surprised to see Callow watching them from the shelter of a nearby mausoleum. ‘How long have you been there?’ Mallory snapped.

  ‘No time for that now,’ Callow replied obsequiously. ‘Listen carefully and I think you’ll hear to whom the little miss is referring.’

  Dimly, the scrape of feet on gravel filtered through the blanketing mist. Moving quickly and silently, Mallory and Caitlin kept low, using the tombs and mausoleums for cover. As the mist shifted across a wide expanse of statuary, they saw the Hortha stalking steadily in their direction.

  ‘What does it take to stop him?’ Mallory said incredulously.

  ‘He doesn’t look like he’s been hurt at all. Yet that thing in the mausoleum was . . .’ Caitlin’s words dried up as she considered the implications of her notion. ‘How are we going to stop him, Mallory?’

  ‘There’s no point thinking about it now. We just need to keep a few steps ahead of him.’

  ‘But we’ll have to rest some time.’

  ‘Maybe we’ll think up a brilliant idea on the way.’

  Returning silently to Callow, they motioned for him to follow as they left the graveyard behind, heading down the rough shale into a bleak landscape of boulders and stones that reminded them of photos they’d seen of the surface of Mars.

  After what they estimated to have been an hour, but may only have been a quarter of that time, the going became harder with sheets of shattered slate underfoot that they had to travel over carefully to avoid turning an ankle or cutting themselves on the razor-sharp edges.

  This sloped down to an area of towering rock formations that merged until they were moving along the bottom of a deep chasm over large fallen rocks. Through the mist, they could just make out holes cut into the walls above their heads - more tombs, Mallory guessed.

  Caitlin thought she glimpsed a head looking down at them out of one of the holes, but the mist closed over it before she was sure. A little further on she definitely did see a figure pulling itself out of one of the dark spaces to watch them pass.

  ‘Yeah, I see them too,’ Mallory whispered to her before she could warn him.

  ‘The dead are an inquisitive bunch,’ Callow said. ‘They half-remember what it was like to be alive and always want to recall more.’ He glanced at the soaring rock walls. ‘Probably best not to get caught by them down here. They’re not at all like me - witty, vivacious company. They can be a little jealous of what you have, and they have lost.’

  ‘How long till we get out of here, then?’ Mallory asked sharply.

  ‘Only forwards, just a little way now. If we are lucky,’ he added.

  ‘I’m starting to question your value as a guide,’ Mallory said.

  A thud resonated behind them, and another: the dead dropping to the rocks from their resting places. Soon the steady tramp of feet followed them. Now whenever Caitlin glanced up she saw the grey, desiccated bodies of the dead levering themselves out of their holes on skeletal arms, some plummeting directly down, others climbing slowly and steadily on near-invisible handholds.

  ‘Let’s pick up the pace,’ Mallory said.

  By then the footsteps behind them suggested a small crowd. Others loomed out of the mists on either side as they passed, their hands grasping for the mercurial life. Men, women, children, some naked, others in rags or shrouds or worm-eaten funeral suits. Caitlin was most disturbed by their gaze, heavy, unblinking, not intelligent, but not stupid either - they were the eyes of animals, with instincts for survival, some quicker than others.

  She started to wonder about the mythology of the place. Did everyone pass through when they died? The dead she saw around her didn’t appear pleasant. Was this instead some kind of purgatory? If so, what did that imply for a system of judgement, for God? The religious teachings of her childhood came back, haunting her with the mystery, troubling her as much as they comforted her. Could Grant and Liam be somewhere in this world? If not, where were they?

  As the dead began to crowd along the walls on either side of the chasm, Caitlin grew more anxious. They had the look of wary dogs about them, docile to all appearances but capable of turning savage at any moment.

  Mallory kept them moving at a rapid pace, but increasingly she felt hands on her clothes, fingers flexing as if preparing to grab, the dry-wood touch of dead skin brushing her arms. Goosebumps ran up her back. The path between the rows of the dead was growing narrower as they drew in on either side.

  And what then? Would they move in on all sides, driving those fingers through her pink skin to investigate the mysteries that lay beneath?

  One woman with lank brown hair and a head that lolled onto her chest lunged suddenly and grabbed Caitlin’s wrist, but the grip was weak and she shook it off easily. Yet it was a warning sign.

  ‘Mallory, I think we have a problem,’ she said.

  ‘How much further, Callow?’ Mallory barked.

  ‘Oh, not far now. A hundred yards, perhaps,’ Callow said without looking back. Caitlin wondered why that was: he usually underpinned every line with a studied expressi
on demanding sympathy.

  Pushing through a flurry of mist, they came up hard against a dead end.

  Trapped in a cleft as the rock walls converged, Caitlin looked back fearfully at the dead slowly advancing.

  ‘Oh dear,’ Callow said. ‘I appear to have missed a turning.’

  ‘You idiot.’ Mallory faced the shambling figures. As he drew Llyrwyn, they stopped and stared dumbly at the faint blues flames sputtering and fizzing along the blade.

  ‘Back off,’ Mallory said. ‘Is there any point talking to them?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Callow replied. ‘They hear. They understand, though it might take a while for their long-dulled senses to flicker into life. See, here.’ Callow edged behind Caitlin and shouted, ‘Look at them, pink and alive! They make a mockery of you! Stop them!’